News

JQuery 2.2 Released   Wednesday 13 January

The latest version of JQuery has been released with better support for cross-browser development.

Traveling Salesman Applied To DNA Synthesis   Wednesday 13 January

One of the fun things about being a programmer is that algorithms that you know can often be applied in unexpected ways in areas that are the domain of other specialists. A good example is the traveling salesman problem being applied to DNA synthesis.

Mozilla Persona Signs Out   Wednesday 13 January

Persona, the single-sign-on solution from Mozilla will shut on November 30, 2016 due to a low level of take up.

Statistical Learning MOOC Restarts Today   Tuesday 12 January

An introductory-level course in supervised learning from two professors of statistics is about to start its third iteration on the Stanford Online platform.

Pestering Peacock Pascal Compiler   Tuesday 12 January

Viterbi Receives 2016 Draper Prize   Monday 11 January

Unless you are into coding theory you may never have heard of Andrew Viterbi, but it is 100% certain that you have made use of his decoding algorithm. 

JavaScript Promises - Free Udacity Course   Monday 11 January

There is still free training to be had from Udacity and a recent addition to the catalog covers JavaScript Promises and helps front-end web developers cope with dealing with asynchronous events and working with asynchronous code.

Ransom32- Even JavaScript Can Implement Ransomware   Monday 11 January

Despite JavaScript living inside the browser's protected and sandboxed environment, thus restricted on what it can or not do on the user's machine, it is still possible, just by innocently browsing the web, for those restrictions to be bypassed upon infection with 'drive-by download' malware.

Automatic Colorizing Photos With A Neural Net   Saturday 09 January

The range of things that neural nets can do is well known to be amazing, but I bet you didn't think of this particular use. It is not only clever, it is of potential practical value.

Facebook Hacker Cup 2016 Just Started   Saturday 09 January

The online qualification round for the Facebook Hacker Cup runs for 72 hours from January 8 16:00 PST (January 9 00:00 UTC). So the clock is ticking and would-be contestants need to get coding and make their submissions.

Project Tango Phones Closer   Friday 08 January

At this week's CES Google and Lenovo announced that a consumer-targeted Project Tango smartphone will launch in the US this summer for less than $500 and Intel started to accept pre-orders for its Tango phone first demoed last summer.

Apache Releases Spark 1.6   Friday 08 January

A new faster version of Apache's Spark open source data processing engine has been released with a new Dataset API and improved data science features.

Stanford Bitcoin Engineering MOOC Proposed   Friday 08 January

A new lab course on building Bitcoin-enabled applications has just started at Stanford. It has attracted a good deal of interest which had led to the idea of producing a MOOC version if there's sufficient demand. 

Microsoft Stops Supporting IE 8, 9 and 10   Thursday 07 January

IE has always been the difficult one when it comes to creating web pages or apps that work in the same irrespective of browser. Microsoft has just announced that all versions except IE 11 will be unsupported as of January 12th, 2016. 

Marshmallow Adoption Lamentably Slow   Thursday 07 January

The latest statistics relating to Android Versions shows that while Lollipop is now only almost a third of devices, Marshmallow is on fewer than one in a hundred and that KitKat still dominates the Android landscape.

The Core

Advanced Perl Regular Expressions - Extended Constructs   Monday 11 January

Perl is still the leader, almost the standard, when it comes to regular expressions. However it also possesses some lesser known features that deserve special attention, like the embedded code constructs for runtime code evaluation. Let's find out what Perl regular expressions are really like with Perl inside.

Deep C# - Delegates   Wednesday 06 January

Delegates are C#'s original way of allowing you to work with functions as if they were first class objects. The aim may be simple but the need to define a type and then an instance of the type can be confusing. Let's see if we can make it all seem logical.